Are You a Sustainable Living Environmentalist?
Author: KURT SCHLOSSER
In the near future, when a pizza gets tossed in the air at Pagliacci, it may not come down until it’s delivered.
The Seattle-based pizza chain has signed on with Zipline, a drone delivery platform which hopes to take some land-based vehicles out of the equation and speed the process of getting goods to people’s homes. Pagliacci is one of three new customers announced Wednesday by Zipline as the company looks to expand U.S. operations and become one of the first to offer commercial drone delivery in Washington state.
Zipline already operates a long-range autonomous drone platform that has been used to deliver medical supplies, blood and COVID-19 vaccines in a handful of African nations. The Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has backed such efforts.The company unveiled its Platform 2 home delivery system in March, promising a quiet, fully-electric machine with a 10-mile radius. It safely hovers 300 feet over a delivery destination and lowers a droid on a tether to gently drop a package weighing six to eight pounds.
There are significant logistical hurdles to overcome, including Federal Aviation Administration guidelines. The agency said in a statement that “safely integrating drones into the National Airspace System is a key priority for the FAA.” It’s doing that with a number of initiatives and rules, some of which Zipline has already achieved under the BEYOND program, a four-year effort to address unmanned aircraft system challenges.
Zipline said it has received Part 135 certification, which, according to the FAA “is the only path for small drones to carry the property of another for compensation beyond visual line of sight.”
The company also recently received FAA approval to enable its onboard autonomous detect and avoid system. The system relies on sound to avoid mid-air collisions as a series of small microphones pick up on air traffic with a range up to 1.25 miles.